Brian Candler wrote: > On Mon, Sep 22, 2003 at 01:13:10PM -0400, Jesse Guardiani wrote: >> Note the 6 zombies. And here's what happens when I try to kill one >> of them: >> >> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ >> [12:[EMAIL PROTECTED]:[/usr/local/vpopmail/domains/wingnet.net]# kill >> [01919 >> 1919: No such process >> [12:[EMAIL PROTECTED]:[/usr/local/vpopmail/domains/wingnet.net]# >> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > You can't kill a zombie; it's a process which has already died and gone.
:) I know. I was just proving that it was indeed a zombie. > The process slot remains, waiting for the parent process to 'reap' it > (i.e. notice that it has died, collect the exit status etc) > > I'd also beware of putting leading zeros on process IDs, because some > programs may try to interpret it as an octal number (not that I think > FreeBSD does) > > My server's very similar to yours, except it doesn't have mod_perl or > mod_php, and I don't see this problem. FreeBSD-4.6.2, due for an upgrade > to 4.9 when it comes out. > >> And again, killing the apache server effectively kills the zombies. > > If X is the parent of Y, then killing X makes Y become the child of 'init' > (pid 1), and then it will be reaped. > >> Any ideas? This is very strange... > > Not really. Either Apache is not reaping its CGI children properly, or > when sqwebmail forks (e.g. to run bannerprog or gzip) it's not reaping > properly. Again, this all started when I upgraded my Apache version from 1.3.27 to 1.3.28 and upgraded the supporting modules and such. sqwebmail doesn't link to anything that would be effected by apache code, does it? (I don't think it does) > > Bearing in mind that the sqwebmail zombie may have been the child of > another sqwebmail process, you could check to see if there are any other > persistent sqwebmail processes on the system (i.e. do a 'ps' a few seconds > apart, see if there are any sqwebmail processes with the same PID which > are not zombies). If so, kill them. > > But if not, then it looks like an Apache problem. If you don't *need* > mod_perl or mod_php on this system, you could try compiling without them > (or not loading the modules, if they were compiled as modules) > > One thought though: are you running --without-authdaemon? If so, sqwebmail > will be doing lots more forking for running authentication modules > directly. I am using authdaemon, so all that sqwebmail needs to do is talk > to it down a socket. Yes, I'm running --without-authdaemon. The sqwebmail binary hasn't been modified since Aug 04 2003, and I performed my Apache upgrades on Sep 19 2003. -- Jesse Guardiani, Systems Administrator WingNET Internet Services, P.O. Box 2605 // Cleveland, TN 37320-2605 423-559-LINK (v) 423-559-5145 (f) http://www.wingnet.net
